Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 00:56:30 -0400
From: crispen@INTERNIC.NET
Reply-To: TOURBUS-Request@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
To: TOURBUS@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: TOURBUS -- 31 JULY 1997 -- ALTAVISTA REVISTED

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Hi, kids!

Greetings from sunny Decatur, Alabama, "soon to be the world's cleanest
city" . . . and also the home of my mommy and daddy.  By the way, I want to
apologize for the lateness of today's post.  Due to a travel schedule that
pretty much took me all over the United States last week, I am just now
getting the chance to sit down in front of a computer to write this.

As I keep saying, "TOURBUS is distributed every Tuesday-ish and
Thursday-ish."  Well . . . I guess today's post is "ish."  :)

Anyway, I want to thank the following sponsors for keeping our tardy little
bus of Internet happiness on the road for another week.  Make sure that you
stop by and thank them for their support!

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Thanks again!  And now, on with the show . . .

     TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP:    ALTAVISTA REVISITED
     TODAY'S ADDRESSES:       http://www.altavista.digital.com/
                              http://altavista.skali.com.my/
                              http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/
                              http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/
                              http://www.altavista.telia.com/

Yes, I know that we last visited AltaVista on April 24th.  However, the
nice folks at AltaVista have introduced so many new features in the past
few weeks that I thought it would be appropriate to pay them a repeat visit.

For those of you who may be new to the Bus (or the Net), AltaVista is one
of the Internet's premier search engines.  What makes it so cool?  Well,
AltaVista's Web index contains over 60 gigabytes of information.  By way of
comparison, that's roughly equivalent to the amount of information that can
be stored on 43,885 floppy disks (I think).

AltaVista's homepage can be found on the Web at

     http://www.altavista.digital.com/

Oh, that "digital" part of the address is very important.  If you leave it
out and try to go to "www.altavista.com" you'll end up at some e-mail
software company instead.

So what is new at AltaVista?  Well, one of their newest features lets you
limit your search results to only those pages published in a particular
language.  To do this, just use the language pull-down menu on AltaVista's
main home page.  Looking for a squirrel page written in Finnish, or a
physics page written in Latvian?  AltaVista can find it for you!

At present, AltaVista can search for pages written in the following languages:

     Chinese         Greek           Norwegian
     Czech           Hebrew          Polish
     Danish          Hungarian       Portuguese
     Dutch           Icelandic       Romanian
     Engli             alian         Russian
     Estonian        Japanese        Spanish
     Finnish         Korean          Swedish
     French          Latvian
     German          Lithuanian

Of course, you can still search for documents written in any language, but
the ability to limit your searches to those documents written in a
particular language is rather helpful, especially if you are one of the
billions of people in the world who speak a language other than English.

AltaVista has also added five-ish new mirror sites around the world:

     ASIA:              http://altavista.skali.com.my/
     AUSTRALIA:         http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/
     LATIN AMERICA:     http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/
     NORTHERN EUROPE:   http://www.altavista.telia.com/
     SOUTHERN EUROPE:   http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/

I said "five-ish" because it looks like the Latin American and Southern
European mirrors are identical.  Still, if you are not in the United
States, these mirrors will give you the opportunity to take advantage of
AltaVista's powerful search engine without having to wait for a connection
to AltaVista's main site in Palo Alto, California.

Finally, AltaVista has replaced its "LiveTopics" tool (which we talked
about on April 24th) with a new tool called, simply, "Refine."  Here is how
it works:

Hop on over to "www.altavista.digital.com" and then run a regular keyword
search.  You can do this by moving your cursor to the search box, typing in
the keyword(s) for which you are searching, and then hitting the "search"
button (or hitting the return key on your Mac or the enter key on your PC).
Just for giggles, let's try a keyword search for Patrick Crispen.

Once you start your search, AltaVista will scan its huge database and
display its results on the screen.  For example, a search for

     Patrick Crispen

will generate about 16,000 hits, and a search for

     "Patrick Crispen"

(with the quotes) will generate about 2,300 hits.  We talked about this
back on April 24th, but it bears repeating: by using the phrase "Patrick
Crispen" (with the quotes) we've limited our search to only those Web pages
that have the word "Patrick" directly next to the word "Crispen."

As we have already seen, doing a keyword search for Patrick Crispen
(without the quotes) gives us 16,050 documents.  Obviously, that is *WAY*
too many documents.  Is there a way to "prune" this down a little?

YES!  After you have conducted a search with AltaVista, click on the
"Refine" button (located to the right of the "search" button at the top of
the page that shows your results).  According to AltaVista, Refine

     "analyzes the contents of documents that meet your original
     search criteria and displays groups of additional words, called
     topics, to use in refining your query."

For example, if you search for Patrick Crispen, and then click on "refine"
after the results appear, you'll get a list that looks something like this:

     99%  Crispen, roadmap, patrick, letter ...
     85%  Alabama, tuscaloosa, commands, neat ...
     78%  Listserv, get, letters
     62%  Squirrel, squirrels, myriad, chomping
     %< snip snip snip %<

Each group of topics has its own pull-down menu which allows you to
"require" that group be included in the next search, "exclude" the group of
words, or ignore ("...") them.  You don't have to "grade" all of the
groups, though.  I have found that "requiring" or "excluding" only 4 or 5
groups works quite well.

Once you have finished "grading" a few of the topic groups, click on the
"search" button on the screen (or press the return or enter key on your
keyboard).  AltaVista will conduct a new search according to your
instructions, and display the new results on your screen.  If all goes
well, the next batch of hits that AltaVista displays will actually include
a link to exactly what you are looking for.

Confused?  You shouldn't be.  AltaVista's refine tool is REALLY easy to
use.  Just try it once, and you'll understand what is going on.

That's about it for this week.  AltaVista have introduced so many new
features in the past few weeks that you really should pay their site a
visit.  I promise that you will like what you see.

TODAY'S TOURBUS STOP:    ALTAVISTA REVISITED
     TODAY'S ADDRESSES:       http://www.altavista.digital.com/
                              http://altavista.skali.com.my/
                              http://www.altavista.yellowpages.com.au/
                              http://www.altavista.magallanes.net/
                              http://www.altavista.telia.com/

--------------------------------
TODAY'S SOUTHERN WORD OF THE DAY
--------------------------------

HOMINY (interrogatory): an inquiry about number or quantity.
Usage: "Hominy times I gotta tell you to don't do that?"

(Special thanks to Alan Coburn for today's word)

YOU CAN FIND ALL OF THE OLD SOUTHERN WORDS OF THE DAY ON THE SOUTHERN WORD
HOMEPAGE AT http://ua1ix.ua.edu/~crispen/word.html
[By the way ... that's "you-ay-won-eye-ex"]

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            .~~~.  ))
  (\__/)  .'     )  ))          Patrick Douglas Crispen
  /o o  \/     .~        Network Solutions Inc. / The InterNIC
 {o_,    \    {          Business E-mail: crispen@internic.net
   / ,  , )    \        Personal E-mail: crispen@brigadoon.com
   `~  '-' \    } ))      http://www.brigadoon.com/~crispen/
  _(    (   )_.'
 '---..{____}                    Warning: squirrels.

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